Day Job and Rose-breasted Grosbeak

We’re behind on our blogging this week.  The day job interferred.  But, here is a photo of one of our visitors this week, and he is far more interesting than our writing anyway.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

Twittering

The Fat Finch

The distaff side of The Fat Finch is now twittering for you and we have added the link over on the right side of the blog.  You only get 140 characters per entry when twittering and the male member of this operation is unable to clear his throat in fewer than 140 characters, so you won’t find him there.  He is, however, able to do Haiku, which seems the perfect format for Twitter.  Absolutely free of charge, and barely worth the cost, here is such a Haiku.

Twittering now, we
Tweet for you at the Fat Finch.
Twitters for the birds.

____________________

A Vulture Flies

A scientific vulture, flying north for the summer, decided to take an airplane instead of doing it himself.  His experiments indicated that while airplanes use far more carbon calories than vultures; they use far fewer vulture-calories.

Knowing that they don’t serve vulture food on airplanes, the vulture brought with him a dead armadillo to snack on.

The ticket clerk asked, “Do you want me to check that for you?”

“No need,” said the vulture, “it’s carrion.”

Good Advice

Mark Twain’s advice was to eat a live frog each morning for breakfast.  That way, he said, you are assured that nothing worse will happen to you all day.

Prairie Falcon - Photographer Unknown -USGS Photo

The reverse of that is to see a falcon each morning.  That way you are assured that nothing better will happen to you all day.  Walking along yesterday on a field trip, thinking that very few birds had shown themselves, flying not more than 10 feet directly overhead and moving far too fast for a slow-witted photographer to get the camera up, came a Prairie Falcon.

It was the best thing of an otherwise fine day.

And have you ever noticed how thinking you haven’t see many birds suddenly conjures up one?  It is a sure-fire method for a sighting.

Fish Eye View of Bird Attack

Words would just get in the way of this video.  Because it is not a You Tube video we are unable to upload directly to the blog.  Click on the link and you will be taken to the slow motion video.  Watch the center left after the video begins. There is no sound and the clip lasts about twenty seconds.

We don’t know to whom the copyright belongs but the video is on a website entitled LiveLeak.com.

Bird Photography, Part II

An Example of How to Do It (from On Feathered Wings)

We have complained in this space before about the documentary nature of most bird photographs.  Taken with lenses longer than your arm, the birds, sharply in focus, inhabit an blurred universe.  Those gargantuan telephoto lens you see some birders lugging around must obey the laws of physics; laws which require those lens to convert the background of the photo, which is the world in which the birds and we live, into a blurry oatmeal of pastel color unlike anything the birds’ eyes or ours ever see.

Let’s face it, not many photographers can take an extreme telephoto shot like the Snowy Owl above and cause you a moment of what James Joyce called “aesthetic arrest”; what people feel in the presence of great art.

Here, for example, is a photo we took of Chuck, our injured neighborhood Greater Roadrunner. Notice the green oatmeal in the background.  Those are trees and a bit of sky back there, but you can’t tell that from the photo, which really is only a documentary photo of Chuck’s injured lower beak.

Don’t get us wrong.  There is nothing wrong with this kind of documentary photography; it just isn’t art.  Some documentary photography is. Think of Robert Capra’s shot of the soldier at the moment of his death in the Spanish Civil War, or the shot of the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square at the end of WWII, or the photo of the naked Vietnamese girl running down the road toward the photographer, screaming as napalm explodes behind her.  Interesting, isn’t it, that much documentary photography that stands the test of time — and that is the true test of any work of art — comes from wars or other tragedies?

Because both the laws of physics and the flighty behavior of birds prevent getting close enough to the bird to enable a photographer with a normal lens on the camera to keep the background as well as the bird in focus, we see nice photographs of birds, but not much fine art.

Don’t get us wrong.  It is possible to create art with a telephoto lens, it just isn’t easy.  Here, for example, is a photo from a great new book, On Feathered Wings. As is the case for many of the photos in the book, this one moves us beyond telephoto documentary photography.

Published by Abrams, a fine-art publishing house, On Feathered Wings, consists of photographs of birds in flight, taken by four photographers from around the world.  And while many of the photographs contain unfocused backgrounds, the background in often the sky and so does not distract from the photo.  The other thing to notice about the photos is that they consist of something more than a static bird in the exact center of the photograph.  (More on composition of your photographs is coming in a subsequent post.)

Two more examples from the book follow.  To be clear, all the photos I am using in this post are actually photos of the photos in the book.  To see the real thing — and to feel its aesthetic effect, you’ll have to buy the book. Here is the Amazon link. We don’t have it listed on our web site yet, but you can buy it from our new physical store. Just call 1-505-898-8900. Truly, it is a fine book and well worth the money.  ($40.00 before any discount) Below are links to the photographers’ web sites, all worth a few minutes of your time.

Still, many of the photographs in the book were taken with telephoto lens which limited the ability of the photographer to create a photo of the birds as they exist in their environment.

We’ll discuss how you can do that, and show you some examples,  in our next installment, “10 Things You Can Do to Take Great Bird Photos.”

____________________

Here are the websites of the photographers of On Feathered wings.  Richard Ettlinger ,  Rob Palmer,  Miguel Lasa, and K.K. Hui.

Birds and Windows, Part 1

We humans engage in two activities that kill millions of birds every year: We keep cats as pets and we erect buildings into the sky and cover them with glass that, to birds, is invisible.  They fly into our glass encased buildings in enormous numbers simply because they can’t see the glass.  To them it looks like an airy passage right through the building.

There are things we can do to minimize the slaughter, both from cats — keep them inside — and from the glass.

It is always good to look at a situation through the birds’ eyes.  For that, we turn to James Thurber, who wrote fables based on the formula employed by Aesop; a story followed by a sentence or two explaining the moral of the story.

Here, paraphrased is Thurber’s tale.

Some builders working on a studio left a large pane of glass propped up in a field one day.  A goldfinch, flying across the field, flew into the glass and knocked himself out.  After he regained consciousness, the goldfinch repaired to his club for a drink and told his friends that the air had crystallized on him as he was flying through the field.  Most of the birds laughed at him, saying such a thing was impossible.  A swallow thought maybe the goldfinch was right so all the other birds laughed at the swallow as well.  Irritated, the goldfinch bet the birds that the same thing would happen to them if they flew through the field. They took the bet and set off to the field.  They tried to get the swallow to join them but the swallow declined, saying, “I — I — well, no.” The other birds took off and all of them hit the glass and knocked themselves cold.

Here is the moral of that story, according to Thurber:

He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

But the moral for our purposes is a little different: glass often acts just like a mirror reflecting the atmosphere, and birds can’t tell the difference.  They think the air crystallized on them. And, we can empathize.  Who among us has not walked into a glass door or accidentally tried to put our hand through a window?

We’ll be back with some practical suggestions for how you can help.

____________________

Photography courtest of EnSky.

Pigeons at Your Bird Feeders – 4 Things to Do

If you build it, they will come.

By “it” we mean a bird feeding station.  By “they” we mean pigeons.  Rock Pigeons to be precise. “Rats with wings” according to Woody Allen and the prosecutors.

Feral pigeons are synanthropic, a big word meaning that pigeons follow humans around like thunder follows lightning.  If you live in a town or city, you can’t get rid of them, but you can learn to live with them.

Here are a few suggestions:

1.  Buy bird feeders designed to defeat squirrels.  Like squirrels, pigeons are heavier than the song birds that visit your feeders.  Some bird feeders have spring-loaded perches that tilt downward if anything heavier than a song bird lands on one. The pigeon or the squirrel slides off the perch.  Sometimes.  We have seen pigeons and White-wing Doves hang on by flapping their wings but they soon tire of that.

2. Another kind of feeder shuts the feeding ports when a heavier bird or a squirrel lands on the feeder. Here is a photo.  It too operates with springs.

3.  Here is a handy little feeder that defeats pigeons every time.  Called “The Clinger,” the ledge is too close to the body of the feeder for a pigeon to get a grip.

4.  Pigeons are ground feeders, designed by Mother Nature to hunt and peck.  As you can see from the photo at the top, taken in our backyard, pigeons prefer to clean up the seed dropped from the feeders by the song birds. Pigeons don’t like eating directly from your feeders anymore than you like them doing it.  They would prefer to be on the ground.

And, as you can tell from the photo, allowing the pigeons to do janitorial work enables the song birds to eat even while the pigeons are feeding, thus eliminating the common problem of pigeons scaring away desirable backyard birds.

We’ll be back soon to mount a defense on behalf of these much maligned birds. In the meantime, we hope these suggestions will keep them off your feeders and on the ground where they belong.

__________________

Unsurprisingly, we sell these feeders at our store.

The Pigeons of War

Homing Pigeon

The holidays brought with them a case of writer’s cramp; the junior version of writers’ block.  For a sufferer of writers’ block an empty page or a blank screen causes terror. For a sufferer of writers’ cramp that blankness merely mesmerizes. It is, I suppose, something akin to the torpor of hibernation.

By the way, the only bird known to hibernate is the Common Poorwill.  More on that another time.  We’re on a roll here and must not be distracted.

While we wrestled with the Cramp, the earth kept turning, the solstice passed, people shopped, the birds kept eating, and people complained about the pigeons at their bird feeders.

The time also brought the sad news of the death of Richard Topus,  one of the last pigeon trainers who served in the Army during World War II; presumably but not certainly, the last war in which homing pigeons were used to send messages across battlefields, a practice that began at least as early as the ancient Persian military and probably before, war being one of mankind’s most ancient practices.  Genghis Khan employed them.  Britain first learned the news of the great victory at Waterloo from a carrier pigeon.

Richard Topus in World War II

Pigeoneers, as people like Mr. Topus were called, served in the United States Army Pigeon Service.  Many were from Brooklyn where the sport of pigeon racing was popular.  Mr. Topus began training and racing the birds as a young boy in Brooklyn. Two of the men who took Mr. Topus under their wings when he was young had been pigeoneers in World War I, when the use of pigeons was far more widespread than in World War II.  Mr. Topus volunteered for service in 1942.

Even with the advances of radio communication by 1942, radio signals remained interceptible and the radios sending them could be found quickly.  The need for pigeons was not gone when Mr. Topus signed on.  More than 50,000 pigeons were enlisted by the United States alone.  The Maidenform Bra company made paratrooper vests with special pockets for pigeons.  Pigeons as well as paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines.

Homing pigeons are simply well-trained Rock Pigeons or, as they were officially named until recently, Rock Doves.   Rock Pigeons can fly for hours at about 30 mph and can get up to 60 mph for short distances. They mate for life and breed freely in and around human habitations. Most likely they are the ones trying to eat from your bird feeders.  You may have seen them at weddings and funerals as well.

Because Rock Pigeons are smart, they can find their way home over vast distances. They can even find their home roost when that roost has been moved during their absence, as frequently happened in World War II when battle fronts were more fluid than the static trench warfare of World War I.  Encoded messages on light weight paper, inserted into small capsules on the legs of their birds often helped battlefield commanders during the war.

Mobile Pigeon Loft from WWI

But every military advance is soon met with a counter-measure.  Someone invents an arrow and someone else invents a shield.  Invent radar and someone will think of dropping aluminum foil to confuse it.  To combat the Allied pigeons — the Germans had their own messenger pigeons — the Germans enlisted falcons. Falcons love pigeons to death. After the Germans deployed falcons, the British countered with their own falcons, thinking to destroy German messenger pigeons.

This didn’t work out too well.  Falcons do not discriminate against pigeons: they will eat any pigeon without regard to race, gender or nationality.  Soon both sides stopped deploying falcons.

People are not the only sentient beings to suffer during war.  Animals are killed and wounded as well.  Pigeons are used not only in battle where they are killed and wounded just like soldiers, they are also eaten by people whose food supplies run low.  (The pigeons, not the soldiers.  Writers with the Cramp sometimes leave ambiguous antecedents stumbling along behind them.)  For more information about the effects of war on birds see our post about the Paris pigeons of World War II, written when we were not under the baleful influence of writers’ cramp.

_________________________
187 years ago today Charles Darwin left England onboard the HMS Beagle on a five-year trip which took him to the Galapagos Islands and other places.  Twenty-seven years would pass before he had the courage to publish what he learned and thought about on that trip. That is a world class case of writers’ block.

Christmas Eve, 1968

Forty years ago this day astronaut Bill Anders took this photo from Apollo 8 and moved poet Archibald MacLeish to write,”To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”

The birds too.